Top 5 Challenges Broadcasters Face When Launching OTT (And How to Solve Them)
Every broadcaster entering the OTT space has a version of the same story. The decision gets made — we need to be digital — and then the reality of what that actually involves starts to emerge. The timelines stretch. The complexity compounds. The unexpected costs appear.
None of this means OTT is the wrong move. For broadcasters, it's the essential move. But there are patterns in where things go wrong, and most of them are avoidable if you know what to look for. Here are the five challenges that come up most consistently — and how to approach them.
Not sure about stepping into the OTT Space? Check our eGuide: The OTT Tipping Point to know more about why to start Now.
Challenge 1: Underestimating the Technology Scope
The problem: Broadcasters know their content and their audiences. What they often don't fully account for is how many technology components are required to deliver a reliable, commercial OTT service. Transcoding, content delivery networks, DRM, native app development, billing systems, analytics, personalisation — each is a discipline in its own right. The temptation is to start with one piece and add others over time. This rarely works as planned.
What happens in practice: Organisations that build incrementally often find themselves, 18 months into their OTT journey, managing five separate vendor relationships, with integration problems that no single vendor takes responsibility for. The result is a fragile architecture that's expensive to maintain and slow to evolve.
The solution: Define the full technology scope before you start. Map out every component you'll need from day one, and evaluate your platform partner on whether they can own the full stack — not just the parts they're strongest on. An end-to-end OTT solution, where a single partner handles everything from media ingest to viewer-facing apps, is significantly lower-risk than a best-of-breed multi-vendor approach.
For a breakdown of what the full scope looks like, our guide to choosing the right OTT platform covers the key components in detail.
Challenge 2: Getting Monetisation Strategy Wrong — or Too Late
The problem: Many broadcasters launch OTT with a single revenue model — typically AVOD (because it mirrors the free-to-air model they know) or SVOD (because subscription feels like the obvious digital move). The problem isn't the choice itself; it's the rigidity. Audience behaviour and market dynamics evolve quickly, and a platform that doesn't support hybrid monetisation from the outset will hold you back.
What happens in practice: A broadcaster launches with pure AVOD, builds a meaningful audience, then realises there's a segment willing to pay for premium content or an ad-free experience. Moving to a hybrid AVOD/SVOD model should be a business decision — but on many platforms, it's also a significant technical project.
Similarly, FAST channels (Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV) have emerged as a powerful distribution and monetisation layer, particularly for broadcasters with deep content libraries. If your platform wasn't built for FAST from the start, adding it later can be disproportionately complex.
The solution: Choose a platform that supports SVOD, AVOD, TVOD, FAST, and hybrid models natively — and lets you activate or switch between them from an admin panel rather than through an engineering project. Build your commercial strategy on the assumption that it will evolve. The AVOD vs SVOD vs Hybrid breakdown is worth reading before you commit to a model.
Check our eGuide: OTT Video Monetisation to learn strategies that accelerate revenue growth.
Challenge 3: The App Fragmentation Problem
The problem: Viewers don't watch on a single device. They start a show on mobile, continue on Smart TV, catch up on a laptop. Serving this behaviour requires native apps on a wide range of platforms: iOS, Android, Samsung Tizen, LG WebOS, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, and more. Building and maintaining all of these to a high standard is a significant ongoing investment.
What happens in practice: Broadcasters who underinvest in app coverage find that audience growth stalls on the devices that matter most. Smart TVs now account for a substantial share of OTT viewing in most markets — particularly in MENA, where living room viewing remains dominant. A gap in Smart TV coverage is a gap in your audience reach.
App quality matters too. Web-wrapped or hybrid apps tend to be slower, less reliable, and harder to get approved in App Stores. Users notice the difference. Reviews and ratings on App Stores directly affect discoverability.
The solution: Verify that any platform you're evaluating builds its own native apps — not through third parties — and that this includes the full range of devices your audience uses. Ask about the release cadence: how often are apps updated? Who manages App Store submissions? What's the process when a major OS update breaks something?
Challenge 4: Managing Content at Scale
The problem: Broadcasters often have large, complex content libraries: thousands of hours of archive, multiple languages, detailed metadata, rights restrictions, and editorial taxonomies built up over years. Getting this into a new OTT platform — and managing it ongoing — is rarely as straightforward as a vendor demo suggests.
What happens in practice: Content migrations are typically underestimated in both effort and risk. Metadata quality issues surface during migration. Rights information is inconsistent. Localisation requirements (subtitles, audio tracks, Arabic metadata) require careful handling. And once you're live, the team managing content day-to-day needs a CMS that's genuinely intuitive — not one that requires constant technical support.
The solution: During vendor evaluation, insist on a realistic assessment of the migration process and timeline for your specific content library. Ask about bulk editing, scheduled publishing, and multilingual metadata support. Have your editorial team evaluate the CMS in a sandbox environment — not just the technical team. If the people who'll use it every day find it confusing in a demo, it won't improve in production.
Challenge 5: Launching Without a Scalability Plan
The problem: Most OTT launches go smoothly at low traffic. The test comes during a major live event: a football final, a breaking news story, an awards show. Traffic spikes can be sudden and extreme, and a platform not built to handle them will drop streams, buffer endlessly, or go down entirely — at precisely the moment that matters most.
What happens in practice: This is often the issue that damages an OTT service most severely and most quickly. Viewers are forgiving of a slow start, but they remember outages during important events. Poor reliability during live events erodes the trust that's essential for subscriber retention and word-of-mouth growth.
The solution: Before you sign, ask for evidence of performance during peak events. What's the CDN architecture? Is it multi-CDN? Has the platform served concurrent audiences of the size you're planning for? What's the monitoring and incident response process? And critically — what are the SLAs around live events, where a 48-hour support ticket response time is simply not acceptable?
Our industry insights series covers technical resilience and scalability considerations in more detail, and we're happy to share specific performance data from our existing deployments.
The Common Thread
Look at these five challenges together and a pattern emerges: they're almost all the result of decisions made (or not made) at the beginning of the process. The right platform partner, evaluated thoroughly against the right criteria, can mitigate most of them before your first line of content goes live.
That's the value of working with a team that has done this many times across many markets. They've seen what goes wrong, they've built systems to prevent it, and they've developed the operational playbook to support you through it.
The broadcasters who've made the OTT transition successfully — whether in Africa, the Gulf, or elsewhere in MENA — share a common trait: they chose a partner as carefully as they chose a platform, and they invested in getting the foundations right before they launched.
For a detailed look at what those foundations look like, the Content is King eGuide is a useful resource — covering everything from content strategy to technology choices for broadcasters making the digital transition.
